An article published on July 14 by Mother Jones produced widespread anger. The piece, written by Kevin Drum, began by discussing newly published research from two political science professors on public perceptions of homeless people. Drum addressed the seemingly contradictory findings that people generally support aid to the homeless but also favor banning panhandling and sleeping in public.

Drum’s controversial passage came when he attempted to reconcile these views with this reasoning (emphasis in original):

The researchers solved their conundrum by suggesting that most people are disgusted by the homeless. No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. Is that really so hard to get?

Drum hastened to say that “none of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless,” adding, “of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings.” But he again reiterated his view that disgust for homeless people is natural and sane: “There’s just no need to deny that these reflexes are both innate and perfectly understandable.”

The profound problems with Drum’s argument are self-evident. To begin with, it relies on a crude, ugly stereotype of homeless people — as well as addicts and people with mental health problems — that makes it hard to believe Drum ever interacts with any people in any of those groups. The work I’ve done with homeless people over the last two years confirms what should be extremely obvious: Many people end up living on the street because of some combination of economic hardship, bad luck, job loss, and a lack of family support; any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy, and compassion — not disgust.

Worse, the reasoning in the Mother Jones article implies that people are naturally and justifiably disgusted by those who lose their homes, struggle with addiction, or have mental health afflictions. Who still thinks this way? It’s as if a caricature of some 1950s retrograde moralizer was reincarnated as a 21st-century columnist for a magazine named after a fiery pro-labor revolutionary.

But perhaps the most serious problem is one raised by the researchers on whom the Mother Jones article purports to rely. In an email to me, which I promptly posted on Twitter, one those researchers — professor Spencer Piston of Boston University — objected that the Mother Jones article profoundly misrepresented their research:

Especially infuriating to me is that he misinterpreted our scholarship to do so. We argue that media coverage of homeless people often portrays them as unclean or diseased, which activates disgust among the general public. But he cites our research as proof that homeless people are inherently disgusting — which perpetuates the very problem in journalism our research was trying to solve.

When that produced no response of any kind from Mother Jones, Piston, along with his co-researcher, professor Scott Clifford of the University of Houston, elaborated on these objections in a short piece they submitted for publication by The Intercept. We are posting it here in its entirety:

We recently reported on our research analyzing why so many people who want to help homeless people also support policies that hurt homeless people, such as banning sleeping in public and banning panhandling. Our key finding was that support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust. That is, in some circumstances, people feel disgust toward homeless people, and as a result seek to avoid them. This motivates some to support exclusionary policies that keep homeless people out of the public eye.

Unfortunately, our scholarship was misinterpreted in some quarters, so here we set the record straight about what our research did — and did not — show.

What we actually found is that the relationship between disgust and public views about homelessness policy depends on three factors. First, it depends on the individual: As previous scholarship in psychology has demonstrated, some people are more prone to feeling the emotion of disgust, or “disgust sensitive,” than others. Second, it depends on whether the policy under consideration is exclusionary. That is, disgust makes people more likely to support policies that remove homeless people from public life, but it doesn’t really affect public opinion about policies that transfer resources to homeless people. Third, disgust is especially likely to be activated when the news media portray homeless people as unclean — as disease threats.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones reacted to our scholarship as follows:

“No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that.”

From our perspective, there are a few things wrong with this statement. We don’t think feelings of disgust toward homeless people are a foregone conclusion rooted in the characteristics of the population. Rather, we suspect that these disgust reactions are primarily due to the fact that homeless people largely lack access to health care and sanitation. Even given this fact, though, not everyone will feel disgust toward homeless people — the emotion is the product of an interaction between personality and context, such as exposure to certain forms of media coverage.

The irony here is that even as Drum distorted our point, he also provided a perfect illustration of it. His depiction of homeless people as inevitably disgusting provides a perfect example of the journalistic coverage of homeless people that we argue is so common, and that our scholarship finds to have such pernicious effects. Portraying homeless people as inevitably or essentially disgusting serves to dehumanize those who are merely struggling to survive.

Drum also seems to imply that disgust is somehow rational or justifiable. However, the emotion is hypersensitive and may promote all sorts of undesirable attitudes and behaviors. In Drum’s defense, he goes on to say that disgust is something that we ought to try to overcome. We agree. Feeling disgust is largely not the result of a conscious choice and it can be extremely difficult to override these feelings. As a result, we don’t think that people should be demonized for feeling disgust.

Unfortunately, many people feel disgust toward homeless people and other marginalized groups, and it can guide our opinions and behaviors even when we know better. Research suggests that the best way to overcome the effects of disgust and prejudice is to spend time considering the perspectives and preferences of members of those groups — which is another reason why it is so important how homeless people are portrayed in the media.

Once this statement was submitted, we sought comment from Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery (who has her own controversial history of statements about homeless people). As a courtesy, I sent her the entire objection from the professors.

After stating that she was unaware of their objections despite my posting their email on Twitter, and after insisting that Drum’s full paragraph be included (it was already discussed in the professors’ article, and I’ve now quoted it), she had only this to say: “Piston and Clifford’s point is that ‘support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust.’ Kevin was attempting, in a very brief post, to challenge readers and policymakers to contend with those shortcomings of compassion.”

At the very least, it seems that if researchers cited by a magazine object that their findings have been radically distorted, to the point where the research is cited to support a conclusion that the research actually negates, that requires a more serious response than the one Jeffery produced here.

But whatever else is true, having these scholars clarify the actual insights of their research into homelessness — and specifically making clear that it is Drum’s mentality that is the cause of so many of the woes of the homeless population — means that some good came out of Mother Jones’s ugly meditations on the “reflexive” and rational disgust toward one of the world’s most marginalized and oppressed populations.

Top photo: A homeless man prepares to sleep during a cold night in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, July 19, 2017.

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I’ve not read the article –I’d bet the author was challenging readers by his comment–and if he wasn’t , obviously such statement is way problematic, and it is simply not representative of the current mother jones which has produced some superb journalism in the last couple of years. To me, this story about the Mother Jones’ story and aftermath smacks more of Glenn Greenwald throwing shade on another strong progressive publication for Gd knows why.

A third have alcohol and drug issues? Not far from the homeless population. Half suffer from mental illness? I would put that you drop most people into those conditions and they would have (or even currently have) the same issues. They are just functional because of economic security.

Jah and Jahnes love Glen. Thank you for a very concerned article about the prejudice that some folks have against homeless people. I am homeless and I have been so for the past 13 years. Me and my family lost our house in Miami, Florida through a Foreclosure. We are Nyabinghi RastafarI, I was a Doctoral Candidate at the time. I worked as an Adjunct Instructor, a Paraprofessional at a Library, and as a Research Assistant to a Professor as well as a Transcriber of Interviews. I worked for my Dissertation Chair to translate documents from English to Ayiti’s language and I also worked as a Researcher and interviewer for other Professors at local Universities. Needless to say that as a child of immigrants from Ayiti, who was born in Brooklyn, NY during the 1960s, it is in my DNA to work and earn my way through life. I never imagined that I would end up homeless and destitute. But, my Nyabinghi RastafarI lifestyle was held against me, and after 9/11/01 life in Miami became seriously difficult. And we were shunned and denied access to opportunities and rights. So, we struggled with our children. I gave birth to a Still born baby girl a few months after we lost our house. And my children’s father who had returned to the U.S. illegally was charged with finding us places to rent (temporarily) or squat. We stayed in hotels like Extended Stay when we could afford to and at other times, we slept in the car when we had no other way. Our children were young, so they put up and that was good. During that time, I got pregnant twice and had my son while we lived in one of our Temporary apartment that was rented for us by a non-black person (there was a lot of anti black prejudice in Miami). He could not live with us because the ICE threatened to break doors to pick up illegals and lock them up until they are deported. More than, that, at times, they arrested and charged the other family members who were in the home. So, we found a squat/rental a few months after my son was born. And, I got pregnant again while we were there. Unfortunately, this was to be our last space because we had no more resources and his Status was not in good standing. I traveled to Canada to pursue my Doctoral Studies and he moved to the West Coast where he could work as a legal marijuana grower. I had to return to the U.S.because of various reasons, and finances were a major problem for me and my 4 children. My daughter was born in a rented apartment without Medical Assistance. And she was not given a Birth Certificate. My children’s father was deported soon after we joined him in Oregon. And we were left to fend for ourselves. And because I didn’t have enough money, I decided to accept my mother’s offer to travel to NYC where she promised me a place to stay at her friend’s basement apartment in Queens. But, after 4 days of traveling on several crowded buses, we got there to a very disappointing situation, and we ended up in a Shelter the same day. And after 3 months, they gave us a Train ticket to return to Miami where my children’s paternal Grandmother promised to provide us with shelter. But when we got there, she refused to let me come in and insisted that her offer was extended only to the children. So, we left and ended up strolling around the Streets. Some Basketball Wives saw us sleeping on a Bench and gave us some money for a Hotel Room. Afterward, we kept wandering until a Rasta Woman picked us up and gave us a place to stay for a couple of nights. And she dropped us off at a Restaurant owned by my children’s cousin who called his Aunt to come get us. We stayed with her for a few days and she contacted her brothers (including my children’s father who was then deported to the Bahamas) to insist that he take care of his children. They got tickets and sent my 3 sons to be with him in Nassau where they stayed for a few months until I got a Squat through an Organization called Take Back The Land. We were allowed to stay in the Squat for 3 months and the police who came to evict us forced us to go to a shelter where they offered us tickets to travel to California to stay with my sister and her daughter. To make a long story short, I was happy to return to The San Francisco Bay Area where I lived while attending UC Berkeley. It didn’t work out at my sister’s. My niece attacked me and I got a concussion. My children were terrorized and we ended up in a Shelter again. And we moved on to Boston where I felt that I would be most likely to get a job at a local University. They gave us a really nice Scattered Site Apartment but after a few months, it was clear that I would not qualify for any of the Public Housing programs that provided apartments to folks like us. And this was mostly due to the fact that my daughter who had been born at home had NO birth certificate a document which is required to complete the application process for the Housing in Boston. None of the Social Workers who saw us weekly and who spied on us when we were not in the space saw fit to try and help me get the necessary document of my daughter’s birth. Their response was to take my children into custody so that they could provide them with Medical Benefits and to request the Birth Certificate from the Canadian Government. My children suffered a great deal while in Custody, they were abused, maltreated and neglected. The so called care takers were prejudiced and stole their coats and educational toys. They had all kinds of false assumptions about our hygiene and refused to wash my children’s dreads and so forth. It was horrible, and I ended up on Probation because I tried to stop the police from taking my kids. Eventually, I no longer qualified for the shelter and my children were sent to live with their father in France where he had moved to marry French National. We both signed a Court document that gave me rights to have contact and visits with the children but a few months after they got there, he cut me off and my attorney would not help me and she didn’t even reply to my messages. I got accepted to a University in Switzerland where I am completing a Ph.D. and I traveled to Paris to try and reunite with my children. I have been in Paris since June 2014 and the Police and other Authorities have refused to help me locate them. My daughter got here when she was 4 years old and she is now 10. I have not seen her or spoken with her in 6 years now. My children have grown up without me. And as a Social Scientist, I cannot tell you how much that hurts and scares me. Immigrants who leave their children behind while they go find life elsewhere always have a difficult time reuniting with their children. And that’s’ mostly because the caretakers are often abusive and push the children to hate the parent. In my case, the father had always been abusive toward me and I can just imagine the awful things that he has filled my children’s impressive minds with about me. I am homeless in Paris, my mother promised to help me find a place to live but her Christian friends came and saw me at the Station where they told me to meet them, and they didn’t like my RastafarI look so they left. I sleep on buses and trains and I beg on the Streets for money to eat and buy necessities. I am hopeful that I will reunite with my children. I want to know what happened to them. And I am certain that I will find a place to live once I return to the U.S. and get a job. Thanks for your article. I feel that prejudice is the biggest problem that homeless people face. And it is dangerous to our well being and the pursuit of our happiness. Blessed love.

After reading some of the malevolent comments here,I can well understand Glen,why we have such an incredible divide in this country.The dems haven’t
stood for their original intents and real obligations since Carter imho.
As an ex N.Y. er ,( can’t afford to live there anymore).I remember quite well buying the homeless news and talking to so called St people .It matters little what we think in our hearts when in fact we just go back to our safe zone .
Thank you for this piece .At the very least it starts conversation .

Mother Jones is as left as left can be. Own it libs. With it comes all the invasive, aggressive, hell-raising, border smudging, MIA listening, fist raising aggression that helps define the progressive left.

No pointing fingers away when the public becomes hip to leftism’s dark underbelly of–among other undesirable traits–elitism combined with NIMBYism. Pointing fingers away from yourselves, attempting to brush the cooties off, is just more from the left’s post-Nuremberg playbook. It’s you.

Drum’s reaction isn’t nearly as far-fetched as Glenn wants to make it out to be. It’s a common and understandable reaction to someone who’s dirty and who’s pushing around a shopping cart overloaded with plastic bags of junk. It’s a common and understandable reaction to an ugly tent city put up near a park or under a freeway. People like living in spaces that are clean and pleasant. The homeless make the world of such people a less attractive and pleasant place. It’s easy to see that the reaction might be sympathy mixed with disgust. “Yes, let’s do something about helping them, but could the first thing we do be to just get them out of my neighborhood and out of my sight.” Makes sense to me.

Jesus fucking christ. All these Americans screech about Jesus as their savior or some shit, but try to get them to walk the walk. Didn’t their Jesus walk among the lepers and the poor and the untouchables?

You, MickVV, are a shallow, vicious person. And if you call yourself a Christian, you might want to consider some serious self-examination.

The people who live in neighborhoods where some homeless people set up tents or pass by with carts are often the bureaucrats and administrators who cause homelessness. And if they want to live without the homeless problem, they should encourage their friends with power and money to make positive changes. In my view, their prejudice or their reactionary approach to the problem does not resolve it at all. They should become proactive and work to end the cycle of homelessness. Many of us feel that we can go to work, and back home to a good life without incident or interference from the so called bad life. But, we all have to lend a hand and donate time and resources to those in need and work to resolve problems that the kkkapitalist system causes. Blessed love.

I think that a lot of the people that the Dems and journos like Drum cater to live in a state of deep anxiety and job insecurity, and a lot of their fears are projected onto the homeless. Many, many Americans are just a few paychecks away from homelessness themselves, and want to close their eyes to the existence of such people. And our politicians oblige these insecure workers by making the homeless as invisible as possible. They criminalize homelessness and in some cases even criminalize people or charities that feed the homeless. So it becomes that much easier for the media to dehumanize the homeless.

So Mr. Drum the only solution to the Korean standoff is to nuke N. Korea? It is worth remarking that he never once considers a peaceful negotiation to the conflict. What’s happened? Did National Review buy Mother Jones? Or maybe Mr. Drum is actually paid by the Council of Foreign Relations to write his crap?

Drum stopped short of endorsing the “nuke North Korea” idea, and his actual point was somewhat different. The reason his article on North Korea sounds so crazy is because he’s internalized a lot of the stupid assumptions peddled by the militarists in the media and elsewhere. Drum was arguing, reasonably, that some militaristic approaches to North Korea are foolish, even though he’s not able to recognize the folly of many other militaristic assumptions.

To understand where Drum’s coming from, you have to picture things from the viewpoint of the silly assumptions shared by most media people:

1) The dangers to world security, to Americans’ safety, and to our freedom all come from forces outside the United States, never from America’s own elites.

2) The institutions in America’s government are good influences on world affairs (at least when a president from MY party is in power), and will lead the way in making us safer and keeping us free.

3) The best hope for security is to get rival countries like North Korea to get rid of their various highly destructive weapons, but America’s own highly destructive weapons need not be abandoned as part of this because they’re hardly a problem.

4) Therefore, we should focus our attention on strategies that good American leaders can use to persuade or force North Korea (and every other similar threatening country) to get rid of their nukes and other highly destructive weapons.

Even when media people don’t fully share these nutty assumptions, some of them feel that they have to speak to their audience as if these assumptions were true. Drum’s article expresses his realization that none of the available paths for America’s leaders will take nukes away from the Kim dictatorship under present conditions. The intelligent thing for him to do, when he realizes that his assumptions don’t lead anywhere, is to start questioning those assumptions. But he’s not going to do that, so instead he throws up his hands and implies that we don’t have “ANY real options”. It’s a ridiculously apathetic conclusion, but he prefers it to questioning his assumptions. A more reasonable person in Drum’s position might come up with better policies to support that don’t rely on these dubious assumptions. For example, Korean unification might help in the long term, but Washington wasn’t friendly to the efforts toward reunification that won Kim Dae Jung a Nobel Peace Prize. Investing in tools to make grassroots regime change easier, and finding ways to increase the cost to governments of fending off the people’s desire for change, would also be helpful I think. And using the Pentagon’s power in less aggressive and threatening ways would likely help in the long run, though there will still be a need for deterrence systems operated by nations or alliances of nations. We will need to keep nuclear deterrence going for some time until changes in the world bring the opportunity to negotiate and enforce the abolition of nuclear weapons. The new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (which Washington opposes) may be one of the seeds of a better future, but it won’t be enough by itself. In the long run, a combination of some of these alternative strategies would work better than threatening to nuke North Korea, which our government has been threatening to do for many decades and which had the effect of forcing Pyongyang to make nukes of its own.

The craziest thing Drum said in his North Korea article was when he suggested that “a surprise nuclear attack on every known nuclear installation in the country” would work better than diplomacy or sanctions. Even if you disregard the fact that we don’t know where all the nuclear installations are, even if you disregard the fact that some of them will be deep underground and unreachable by nuclear attack, Drum is still failing to see the obvious point that the North Korean government will have prepared a deterrent counterstrike to retaliate in case of such a sweeping surprise attack. The North Korean retaliation wouldn’t have to be nuclear; it could use other weapons of mass destruction, some of which may have been smuggled out of North Korea already by North Korean agents. I know our government is trying hard to keep weapons from being smuggled out of North Korea, but there’s no reason to think that our government has been perfect at preventing this. I know Drum isn’t really in favor of nuking North Korea, but I don’t think he fully appreciates how crazy it would be. What we need is more grassroots efforts toward saner approaches to North Korea, and unfortunately people like Drum are mostly getting in the way of that.

Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery (who has her own controversial history of statements about homeless people).

Unsaid is this is par for the indulged, safe space progressive left. Its reaction more than anything is to clinicalize, even institutionalize, the pests in ways not unlike progressive antecedents like Margaret Sanger.

The only disgust I feel when I see homeless people is disgust with capitalism!

NYC now has over 60,000 officially registered homeless, and far more than enough empty housing for all of them, but these buildings are owned by billionaire investors. Most New Yorkers will tell you that housing is so expensive here because there are too many people, but that’s really not the reason. The reason is that the banks keep tons of housing off the market to insure that prices remain in the stratosphere.

A similar situation exists in pretty much every capitalist city, though in the US it is now much worse than it was before. I have heard that São Paulo, Brazil, has about half a million empty apartments.

I’ll add to the number you quote that about 500 of those people in NYC are not sheltered every night and sleep on the street. Many of these homeless are sheltered in what at one time were upscale hotels.

It appears that some of these homeless are coming to NYC because there is shelter available adding to an already taxing situation. If you confiscate/steal some wealthy people’s property and give it to the homeless they wouldn’t even be able to pay the taxes but more homeless would head to NYC to get their free condo.

‘Twould appear they pulled their article. I read it and though aloud: Fuck. You. Do you notice ‘studies’ are, by design, written is such a way to either bore or confuse the layperson, and now, with the prosaic writing ‘news,’ the people get a game of telephone, filtered each time by a dumber point of view, until it’s something like: ‘human DNA now being spliced into the world’s supply of rice’… wtf

Many people end up living on the street because of some combination of economic hardship, bad luck, job loss, and a lack of family support; any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy, and compassion — not disgust.

Drum is correct: fear and/or disgust are involuntary instinctual responses to those who are perceived as posing a potential personal threat or chronic public nuisance. Homelessness severely exacerbates the inability of mentally ill and alcohol and drug dependent individuals to maintain even a rudimentary level of hygiene. Because these two groups of individuals are most often the public face of homelessness, their chronic erratic behavior and bedraggled appearance fuel much of the disgust that is generally directed at the homeless. When coupled with the fact that their lack of sobriety and destitution often culminate in fear inducing aggressive behaviors, the entire population of homeless are routinely painted with a broad brush.

Drum is correct: fear and/or disgust are involuntary instinctual responses to those who are perceived as posing a potential personal threat or chronic public nuisance.

Actually, Drum said this:

You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that.

Which implies that if you don’t feel disgust, you are somehow abnormal. Is that a true statement for you?

If you feel empathy and compassion for someone who is homeless, are you abnormal?

While a large segment of the population might have responses for reasons you indicate, other swaths of the population would not have those feelings and why would we then consider those persons exhibiting compassion for someone who is homeless as ‘crazy’?

Drum is correct only to the extent that persons exhibiting disgust are those persons who have no compassion or humanity. But even then, this I would suspect that feelings of disgust (to part of even that segment) are limited to general hygiene and that is the state of uncleanliness that is the issue and not the causes of homelessness and also doesn’t preclude feeling compassion.

ie…one can be disgusted by the hygiene, but still have compassion for the individual due to his/her personal circumstances. ie…not mutually exclusive concepts, I guess is what I’m trying to point out.

well, the word crazy is a pejorative word for mental illness, so he was actually saying you have to be mentally ill not to feel disgust for the mentally ill, which is a really ugly thing to say. Also, it’s a very stupid thing to say.

not mutually exclusive concepts, I guess is what I’m trying to point out.

Drum also said that disgust and compassion aren’t mutually exclusive.

The only mistakes Drum made were giving his own explanation for the disgust, and asserting that it would be “crazy” not to feel it. What he needed to do was stick to the research which does support his claims that the disgust is “reflexive” (arising through “a set of psychological mechanisms that help prevent contact with pathogens”) and “understandable.” The research made it understandable.

Which implies that if you don’t feel disgust, you are somehow abnormal. Is that a true statement for you?

I have already defined that which reflexively triggers disgust in the average Joe. Personally, I have acted as an advocate for two mentally ill brothers for the better part of forty years. During that period of time, each has experienced long stretches of homelessness that resulted in extremely poor hygiene. For example: their clothing would take on a putrid smell of rancid flesh, urine, and sweat that would become so severe that they could not even enter public buildings without being asked to leave in short order. Neither brother was able to sense the degree to which their ever evolving bedraggled state of decomposition overwhelmed the olfactory senses of others and thus took great offense at being summarily shunned upon their approach. Even when I could convince them to let me wash their clothing, I was unable to eradicate the odor. Thus I was forced to discard every stitch of clothing as opportunity scantly allowed. The chore of addressing their prolonged lack of personal hygiene however was far more problematic. Canker sores, blisters, festering wounds, rashes, hemorrhoids, lice, scabies, styes, and fungal infections all had to be addressed as a pretext to supplying them with a replacement set of clothing; all of this was done with the certain knowledge that their ever evolving bedraggled state of decomposition would resume in short order. I love my brothers. Yet the initial disgust and revulsion that I felt for the condition they were in when they came knocking on my door for help was/is wholly reflexive; acknowledging these involuntary responses is essential to correcting understanding the true plight of the homelessness.

Here is a simple challenge for those who claim not to be disgusted by such circumstance: Find a homeless person akin to that which I have described and have him/her come and live with you for a week.

“In Drum’s defense, he goes on to say that disgust is something that we ought to try to overcome. We agree. Feeling disgust is largely not the result of a conscious choice and it can be extremely difficult to override these feelings. As a result, we don’t think that people should be demonized for feeling disgust.”

But demonizing Kevin Drum is the whole point of Glenn Greenwald’s article!

“Any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy, and compassion — not disgust,” says Glenn Greenwald, contradicting the same researchers he pretends to support, and here we go again with Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” and all the rest of the goody-goody games that so-called progressives play instead of actually helping anybody.

Drum hastened to say that “none of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless,” adding, “of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings.”

He made the exact same point as the authors of the study. And it was correct, as far as it went. But the purpose of the article was not demonization. It was to point out where Drum strayed from what the authors actually wrote about their study. Critique is not the same as demonization.

But whatever else is true, having these scholars clarify the actual insights of their research into homelessness — and specifically making clear that it is Drum’s mentality that is the cause of so many of the woes of the homeless population — means that some good came out of Mother Jones’s ugly meditations on the “reflexive” and rational disgust toward one of the world’s most marginalized and oppressed populations.

This is the first I’ve heard of him. The N. Korea article you pasted in above, plus this homeless article are indeed horrible. What is he doing at Mother Jones? Drum should go write for some right wing website like National Review, or WaPo. He definitely sucks.

“I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.” congrats, drum – you shot from yuppie to bateman in one article!

and speaking of retrograde: “You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that” is the exact excuse many homophobes use for their idiotic issues. cuz it sounds like science and such, y’know. “i’m not trying to bash _____, they just set off my acid reflux is all!”

i fondly remember reading mother jones way back in the day (though steadman’s art creeped me out as a kid) and seeing it now i don’t even recognize it. such is life i suppose.

“We recently reported on our research analyzing why so many people who want to help homeless people also support policies that hurt homeless people, such as banning sleeping in public and banning panhandling. Our key finding was that support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust. That is, in some circumstances, people feel disgust toward homeless people, and as a result seek to avoid them. This motivates some to support exclusionary policies that keep homeless people out of the public eye.”

Exclusionary policies? Is that what converting old houses and buildings for homeless shelters or any kind of state assistance for the homeless (or threatened by homelessness) is being spun as now? Free meal sites are exclusionary?
And because panhandling and sleeping in public are the No Government reality response to certain people’s inability to afford housing and food for whatever reasons and we live under that sort of no government , we should alternative reality spin it and call the it inclusive living that all humanitarians should support. Is this is as good as its gonna get?

Is THE problem for the homeless really the feelings of people who want their government to help fund helping them including prevention but are also have unpleasant feelings about homeless campsites and being harassed for money?
there’s no need for analyzing the feelings of people who do NOT want to help at all or advice on how journalists should reach them? (the them who also happen to be in control of the government)

Also I wanted to add a couple of things. One disgust is a strong word. I in general dislike most people. I dont discriminate there. ;-) I also dont see any point in arguing over how people should feel about anything. Its a nothing zone.

free meals are often shut down, yes, and the poster said nothing about converting old houses. what happens is the sleeping in public is banned and there are no houses to replace that, old or otherwise.

If so isn’t the problem the lack of homeless shelters and free meal sites?
And who wants that help to end? Not the people who want to help
But providing those things does mean the homeless are excluded from the public in the way they were using that space before.
everything is spun nowadays, ya know

I am very much for helping people in this situation and in a variety of ways but that also includes being for laws against panhandling (not so much about homeless campsites) because the rest of us have to live here too
I don’t want any of it to be a normalized accepted part of American living, where nothing needs to change other than “disgust” for it

maybe on a more positive note, there’s been people who work in various agencies on tv/online around here who have asked the public not to give panhandlers money because it usually is spent on alcohol/drugs and that keeps them out of shelters and other places that could help them.
There’s also been an outreach going on that tries to let people know where resources are that can be helpful to them.
If any of that is important to those involved then its good to know

I think The Intercept was WAY too kind to Drum and Jeffery; their behavior was and is despicable.

Unfortunately, “Mother Jones” has fallen a LONG way from the days of my youth when I’d read a copy after the adults in my life were done with them. I recall a true progressive voice, with loads more compassion than that shown by the present -ahem- people who produce the rag today. VERY sadly, it’ll be a GOOD day when the current Mother Jones goes out of business.

Sure it’s gross the conditions under which homeless people often live, but JFC…how inhibited is your empathy-response if your first response is disgust towards the people, and your second response is then to explain why your stereotyping and dehumanizing is actually rational?

How is it assumed that 50% of the homeless are mentally ill and that a third are drug abusers? Certainly not through healthcare. Maybe the statistics are a mirror of the population at large? What if people were as reluctant to diagnose the homeless as having mental illness as they are the president? If you want to see a stereotype of the homeless, visit a truckstop. Not many brag about being homeless, they’re probably the most impossible group to keep tabs on, as no one knows how many are on or off the grid. They’re disgusting because they’re the bottom social class.

The percentage of homeless that are mentally ill is not *assumed*. There are public/NGO agencies that interact with them every day. Using common statistical analysis they can arrive at a valid +/- percentage.

In my irregular interaction with the homeless the estimate seems accurate.

Just about anyone who has any problem whatsoever can be diagnosed as having a form of mental illness. Thus those numbers are greatly exaggerated or we should accept that as fairly indicative of the general population as well.

It sounds like a tempest in a teapot. While Drum could have been more precise in his writing, there is some benefit to discussing negative emotions that some people experience in observing or interacting with some some homeless people. I cannot agree with Greenwald’s blanket assertion that “any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy, and compassion — not disgust.” One could experience disgust or other negative emotions without being an indecent human being. For example, if the homeless person were to be extremely unclean, with a strong odor of urine and excrement, it would be normal for a person to experience some feeling of repulsion. Furthermore, reacting with sympathy, empathy and compassion are not necessarily incompatible with feelings of disgust. The feeling or emotion does not compel us to act in any particular manner.

You need to put blinders on to not see how this characterization fits into the Kevin Drum continuum, the Clara Jeffery continuum, the whole hollow scam where Mother Jones magazines pretends to be fighting for the little people instead of for the interests of the Democratic Party’s big donors.

MJ has done some outstanding journalism over the years – last year’s expose on the private prison industry by Shane Bauer being a great example.

But the idea of focusing on “disgust” as a barrier toward helping people is neither useful nor accurate, impossible to measure, and frankly – an utterly useless approach to solving the problem of homelessness.

Disgust is a function of ignorance, and ignorance dissipates with experience. If we want to solve homelessness, the first step is to see them for whom they are: fellow travelers – well met and worthy of the same dignity and quality of life as the rest of us.

Looking at the detail of the picture for this article, this happens to be the day my friend “Lima” passed away. She’s since been in her afterlife and homeless. We both had a phone number in 310 prefix area at one time. Memories… If only she could come back for us to set the record straight.

One of the things I like most about Greenwald is how he stays above the fray and distills the most important points of an issue. But not this time. Ostensibly about misrepresenting research, the first part of this article is actually about why we shouldn’t think the homeless are disgusting.

It’s a common trap for liberals — something is said with elements of truth to it that’s not sensitive/pc — and here Greenwald takes the bait. Drum and Greenwald can argue ad infinitum over the subjective question: what percentage of homeless people are disgusting. And while he’s taking the bait Greenwald loses his own credibility as well as the credibility of the important underlying issues that he’s usually great at discerning: in this case the causes of homelessness and solutions to these.

Thank you for writing your article about homeless people. I wish more reporters would write good pieces like this one — and keep on writing — until our people, and then our legislatures, pay attention. I belong to an organization whose members critique each others poems and prose; every once in awhile, someone writes a particularly fine work about homelessness. I think your article has inspired me to try one, myself. If it’s any good, I think I’ll mail it to all our senators and representatives. (I don’t see any point in sending it to D. Trump.) Thanks again for your empathy, this excellent article, and your sincere attempt to straighten out a couple of writers who may have lost their way on this subject. I’m so very grateful for this fine piece of work.

Thank you so much for helping homeless people. People just don’t understand there are a lot of people with mental illness who just can’t take care of themselves but with a little love and support they can live happy lives. There’s no need for them to suffer the way so many do with no one caring what happens to them. Addicts need understanding and help as well. And for people who have just fallen on hard times, where’s the safety net? It’s been eroded away. People see homeless people as the other but more and more people are being pushed through the cracks and it will soon be Their child, neighbor, friend who is being neglected and pushed into the shadows to suffer alone and forgotten.

Really? I don’t see any distortion, their explanation confirms how Drum described the findings:
“Our key finding was that support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust.”

I don’t think it is very hard to understand why. Whatever one may say about the causes and reasons for homelessness and compassion, it is natural to feel disgust by people who doesn’t shower frequently, for instance. Who has not encountered a very stinking homeless person before?

I am making an assumption, from the way you have phrased some of your comment, that English is not your first language. Apologies if this is incorrect. I only raise that as a possibility because I think you have missed a key distinction between what the authors of the study say,

“Our key finding was that support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust.”

and what Drum wrote,

You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. Is that really so hard to get?

The authors acknowledged that disgust is part of what fuels the social rule-making, while Drum seems to be insisting that disgust is the normal, expected, reaction with his implication that disgust is something one would be not to have (i.e. that is the natural or normal response).

That verbiage is what is problematic. While it may have been inadvertent, it is difficult to take that formulation and not then interpret it to be, um, uncharitable at best, and/or revealing at worst. That is where Drum has, as they say, stepped in it. And that is the, um, stench that he has been dragging around for several days as he doubles down in an attempt to excuse his verbiage, rather than acknowledging the critique that has, justifiably imo, come his way.

Keep it real Glen! The Democrat’s like “virtue-quests”, don’t they? Guess the homeless are a bit too challenging for them. I am “disgusted ” by their opinions. This is what merit’s column space these days?! Partisan opinion- page attacks on the destitute and displaced!
My mother worked for a State Mental Health hospital her entire life. Gov’t closed it in the Clinton-Era. I remember I asked a direct care worker what would happen to all the patients. She replied, “I have no idea what many of these people will do now.”

As your lead story points out, the drug addicted are quickly becoming a statistic. The police department’s don’t even want to give Narcan to overdose victims! Law enforcement doesn’t understand that Narcan can immediately send the overdose victim into detox symptom’s. So, if you aren’t providing a rehab program that can prescribe med’s for those miseries, they will run for the nearest dealer to stop the (sometimes fatal) side effects of Narcan.
I don’t believe either elite political party want do anything. No money and endless headaches in social issues.
Where did I read the story of someone out in California trying to buy tiny homes for the homeless out there? Was it TI? I remember the reaction by local Californian’s was “disgusting”. They claimed there property values were at stake. Maybe real estate out west is a bit over-valued, is my take. Even parking lot’s became a controversy.
I say Universal Healthcare + Perhaps.. philanthropic landowners who aren’t “disgusted,” could donate land that tiny homes could be put on? I’m certain I’ll be needing one soon.

I think he was attempting to humanize the subjects, and botched it by trying to squeeze social commentary into a sondbyte.

The piece was nearly a meme, barely an article. Typical of targeting the kids today.

It’s also difficult to transition a magazine to follow a generational shift, and the younger readers just aren’t deep enough, or human enough to “get it.”

Then, there’s the factor that it is difficult to transfer knowledge about this huge issue rom one generation to the next; which is made MORE difficult considering that the largest population of actual homeless people ON THE STREETS and not in a women’s and children’s shelter, are male.

These are the kids of the single mother generation he is targeting, and they have little to no historical perspective of the crisis of homelessness: share croppers, dust bowl farmers, the IWW, and veterans-lots of male veterans.

So the issue is really about men being yet again delivered to us as something “barely tolerable” and sort of “disgusting,” without ever opening up that hornet’s nest. And even then, my comment here is nearly as long as that “article.”

It takes a bunch of rich or upper class so-called experts to really get everything wrong about the homeless problem and people’s reaction to it. Not just Mother Jones, but the original researchers as well, both make the same mistake. In the real world of homelessness most of the people that you recognize on the streets or parks and so on as “homeless” are just a tiny percentage of the actual homeless population. They are the ones that people feel “disgusted” towards because they are obviously homeless due to either being drunk, stinky and dirty, drugged out, stinky and dirty, or clearly have mental problems by dragging around shopping carts full of their stuff and are unkempt. Most homeless people are not recognizable because they do not fall into those categories. They keep clean, or at least relatively clean and they look like everyone else, or maybe they look like someone out travelling by hitchhiking. Most homeless people are not visible to everyone else as homeless unless there are homeless encampments, like in Hawaii where homeless encampments rise up with lots of tents and families.

Interesting to me that the word fear doesn’t appear anywhere, but suppose there’s some assumption that it’s kin to disgust. Fear, that is, of being in their position. Easier to assume it was some choice as they do about sexual preference/identity, etc.

Disappointed in Mother Jones.

Have a hard time not seeing quite a bit more behind the depiction in the media, especially given various other factors. :)

Mr. Greenwald is correct that society requires a little hypocrisy in order to function. The reality may be that we detest anyone who is richer or poorer than ourselves, but we all have to live together and should try to pretend that we like one another. I’m not sure what possessed Mr. Drum to express his honest opinion, but hopefully he has learned his lesson and won’t do it again.

I am, however, sympathetic to Mr. Drum’s argument that the academics don’t understand their research. I have never met an academic who understood their own research, so this assertion rings true.

Baby Jesus was homeless, a child even born by an immaculate conception. Moses The Stutterer wandered around the desert for 40 years, homeless. Our trustworthy apostle, the Arabian Prophet, was like a rolling stone – wherever he laid his hat was his home.

All the Great Academics were pretty much homeless, benitoe … you must be thinking about tenured professors.

(I, myself, once had to live in a cave with a female panther up on the Big Andy ridge for a while and she never did get use to me. Got so hungry I was going to kill some guy’s cow with a homemade spear … ’til I found half a can of discarded peanuts, which sustained me in my hour of need.)

*No, for crying out loud. When I think of ‘disgusting’ … I think of Trump’s lard ass sitting at home on that faux gold toilet.

I don’t know where you’ve been the past few years, but if someone implies that you should Obviously feel a certain way about something, why are you even thinking past that?

Anyways, I don’t know about empirical research on the subject, but I cast a vote into the pile of finding it disgusting to revictimize people who are already clearly going through perhaps the worst times in their lives

I don’t know where you’ve been the past few years, but if someone implies that you should Obviously feel a certain way about something, why are you even thinking past that?

It is disturbing how stubborn Greenwald can be at insisting on actually paying attention to details. And there are a number of us who either share that trait or have picked it up somewhere along the way when we had obvious brainfarts that displaced our natural tendencies to bow down to authority.

However, few of us are so brazen as to actually advertise it by pasting it at the top of our social media.

Glenn Greenwald?Verified account @ggreenwald

The most important thing a consumer of news can do is to critically assess reporting. Critically.

We don’t have to be perfect. We can have feelings that we’re not proud of and still be good people. When dealing with strangers, it’s our behavior that’s important, not our feelings. When we’re discussing public policy, what’s important are the decisions we make, not our feelings.

What’s more, the exclusionary policies are popular even among those who support aid to homeless people: 47 percent of those who favor aid to homeless people also support banning panhandling, while 44 percent support a ban on sleeping in public. Only 29 and 36 percent opposed these policies, while the rest took no position.

So why the apparent contradiction?

In our article, we argue that disgust helps explain why so much of the public supports both policies that transfer resources to homeless people and exclusionary policies that cause them harm.

If we consider this contradiction a problem, how do we address it? By shaming people for a feeling that the researchers DO say is natural? Or do we address it like this:

None of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless. Of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings. In fact, overcoming reflexive feelings is what makes us decent human beings in the first place. There’s just no need to deny that these reflexes are both innate and perfectly understandable.

Drum made some mistakes in his article, but that is the point he was getting to, and it’s worth making. The message to “so much of the public” can be your feeling is understandable, but don’t you want to be a decent person and overcome it when making these important decisions? All that’s required is your vote, and maybe a little material support. The perfect people will take it from there. That can work. I don’t think Drum deserves to be scorned for suggesting it.

Thanks for the pro-Drum message. I like your dry remark about how the quote-unquote “perfect people” will take it from there. I’m not taking back any of the criticism I made of Drum and his ilk in my comments below, and I think the ostensible conclusion you quote from the last paragraph of his article is even undermined a bit by some of the dubious things he laid stress on early in his piece. But I want to stay aware of the serious mistakes people like me make too. You’re right to draw sympathetic attention to his nuanced conclusion. I don’t think any of us have found what a constructive approach to politics is yet — it’s not going to be about the perfect people taking it from there — but I’d like to listen and work together.

The MJ article is off base, and Drum’s generalizations unwarranted, inaccurate and ugly. But Glenn, who I typically agree with emphatically, is going overboard here.

By stating that “any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy and compassion” and in turn implying that being supportive of banning sleeping in public or panhandling is entirely contradictory to or renders insincere sympathy or empathy towards the homeless, Glenn is in turn generalizing those who hold these seemingly contradictory opinions about the homeless.

Disgust is not the only genesis of stances against panhandling or sleeping in public (though I don’t know who worries all that much about the latter). Here in Philadelphia, thanks to the opioid epidemic, panhandling by opioid and heroin addicts has become epidemic in many of our neighborhoods. Major thoroughfares that lead in and out of our neighborhoods are lined with panhandlers collecting cash from well-meaning drivers. The reaction to it from virtually every resident I’ve spoken with, including myself, has been negative. Is it because we find these individuals digusting? Or want them out of sight? Or lack sympathy? Absolutely not.

It is because their presence leads to the creation of open air drug markets in neighborhoods which haven’t seen such problems in 20 years. Once panhandling becomes common in an area, it doesn’t take long for dealers to realize that they’ll turn over more product by going to where the addicts are collecting money, rather than waiting for the addicts to travel across the city to them.

This leads to battles over territory, which includes violent gun crime.

It is far too broad a brush to suggest that those that don’t want open air drug markets and gun violence in the neighborhood where their children play outside every day therefore lack empathy or sympathy for the homeless.

Our city services and public servants should be working to get those with addiction problems off the street and into treatment.

My m-m-m-m-mom, Adrea Dworkin was homeless for awhile, but SOMEHOW always had the money to be in Holland and also in Minnesota at THE SAME TIME. Some suspect it was ‘mystery money’ that fueled her, but I know for a fact that she snacked on anything she could get her hands on, including me.

While mothers are known to nibble at babies butts and so on, my m-m-m-mom took huge BITES out of America’s future-and my butt.

For my part, as regards homeless dogs, it doesn’t matter to me how you cook the puppies, as long as you clean them first. The homeless PEOPLE, however, taste better raw.

And BTW:why hasn’t anyone connected the huge dot between Anti-Defamation League spy scandal of 1993 whee they were caught spying on 12,000 anti-apartheid, and peace activists, and today’s total surveillance state that plays by the same rules, and spies on the same people?

… some good came out of Mother Jones’ ugly meditations on the “reflexive” and rational disgust toward one of the world’s most marginalized and oppressed populations …

“Ugly meditations”?

Strong stuff against a magazine that has a circulation of about 200,000.

What would it take to call to account a news organization of the size of — say — Fox News?

How about a story in which Fox News colludes with the president of the United States to publish a false narrative about the murder of a Democratic staffer?

That would be a story!!

Not just ugly, but likely criminal.

A wealthy Trump supporter and a Fox News producer conspired to run a fake story about the death of a Democratic National Committee staffer while the White House looked on, a lawsuit has alleged.

Rod Wheeler, the detective cited in Fox News’ controversial story about the fatal shooting of DNC staffer Seth Rich, has filed suit against the company for allegedly fabricating his quotes and pressuring him to push a false narrative.

“According to the complaint … Fox News was working with the Trump administration to disseminate fake news in order to distract the public from Russia’s alleged attempts to influence our country’s presidential election,” Mr Wheeler’s attorney, Douglas Wigdor, said in a statement. Independant —
Emily Shugerman New York 8/1/2017

Unfortunately, this story would put another hole in the hull of the luxury cruise liner Wikipedia. (e.g., Russia didn’t do it — the horrible DNC did it to protect their candidate and to hide their well-known alliance with the Deep State.)

Better to stick with sanctimonious condemnations of Mother Jones:

At the very least, it seems that if researchers cited by a magazine object that their findings have been radically distorted, to the point where the research is cited to support a conclusion that the research actually negates, that requires a more serious response than the one Jeffery produced here.

Or for that matter condemnations of the awesome Awan Bros eh!?..oopsie-daisy

Hahahaha

A fake conspiracy. Caught red handed?

Quick Foxy Battyman! Find a new fake conspiracy!

Aha! Here’s one with evil Pakistanis as the villains in cahoots with the evil DNC. It’s perfect!

And when this is eventually disproved — like everything from Whitewater to Birtherism — the elves will have another fabrication for the gulls. That’s how Fox News continues to exist. Truth is fungible — it only counts if lots of people believe it.

How about a story in which Fox News colludes with the president of the United States to publish a false narrative about the murder of a Democratic staffer?

That would be a story!!

I am aware of that story, yet still, at your urging, I googled it, milton. The search terms “fox news producer democratic national committee staffer wealthy trump supporter” yielded “About 773,000 results (0.86 seconds)”. That isn’t sufficient to satisfy you? You need to come here and demand that TI cover the story you don’t think has been covered enough?

Well, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to try to force the one outlet that covers the group you least like to examine in any detail to turn their heads in the same direction as the rest of the mooing herd, but I for one am thankful for writers who feel it is at least as important, if not more so, to examine those who pay lip service to representing the downtrodden, all while barely hiding the curling sneers they can’t quite keep those same lips from manifesting in the midst of their pious pronouncements. All while writing at an organization named for a woman who worked tirelessly for the same kind of people they can’t quite help being disgusted to have to share the streets of America with.

All while writing at an organization named for a woman who worked tirelessly for the same kind of people they can’t quite help being disgusted to have to share the streets of America with.

I suppose in the land of free association, one association is as good as any other association.

If the comments of a single writer about a discarded topic published in a not particularly influential magazine can produce the sort of sanctimonious “virtuism” so common — and voluminous — on this site, I understand your outrage.

Anyone who disagrees with that virtuism — I call it sanctimony — displayed by this article must root for likes of Eric Prince, Martin Shkreli and Scrooge McDuck.

Here’s a news flash … but you can’t google it.

I don’t care what Kevin Drum says or thinks. About anything. I don’t care if he picks his own nose or thinks people who pick their own noses are disgusting. I just don’t care.

If you enjoy your fleeting moments of virtuism, if by feeling aghast over the emotional reaction of some writer you don’t read, you might as well watch soap operas because your interest isn’t in the world but in your own self-satisfaction.

That’s what I mean by virtuism.

I read, I look, I write, I question, I surmise not because I need vindication for myself (I’m long past that possibility) but because I need to know what is happening in this world.

It’s not a desire, it’s a need.

If I don’t enjoy your boutique coffee house here, it’s not because it’s such a terrible place, it’s because of comments like the one that preceded yours (uncle bob). For every poster sincerely disturbed by the mistreatment of the downtrodden (and I am one of those), there are twenty here who lie, distort, confuse and mislead.

But more than that, my motive for my original post, is my annoyance with the rather consistent theme of dirtying the small to tarnish the large. It’s quite common here and this article is a perfect example.

It follows a similar pattern pushed by the malignant-stream media.

They’re not interested in the world — they’re interested in pushing a malignant agenda which favors the rich, ignores the plight of many citizens, broadcasts talking points rather than reality, pushes policies of commercialism and repression and which — literally — is responsible not only for Trump but for the amorality of the entire society in which we find ourselves.

For instance, I watched about forty minutes of Fox tonight. (to contrast with msnbc). Tucker Carlson debated someone about Sharia law in the US (a bad thing according to TC) while on the next program, some douchebag was attacking “sanctuary cities” by pulling out a story of an illegal immigrant who raped two women. He called sanctuary cities — iirc — ” sanctuary rape places” . He also went on about media hunting rabbits while he (Foxers) hunted whales.

And btw — the story isn’t being covered in most of the press yet, but I think that’s because it hasn’t caught up with Trump quite yet. But I would expect a commentator — Mr. Greenwald — so determined to exonerate Wikileaks and Russian influence to be motivated by the intentional fabrication of news rather than the gauche opinions of some writer for Mother Jones.

To appropriate from the Fox douchebag, Mr. Greenwald is hunting mosquitoes while stuck in quicksand.

milton, your lengthy and meandering response to my pointed critique of your comment is one of the reasons I seldom read, let alone respond to you these days.

First, let me assure you, nothing you write here prompts me to outrage. Not in the least. That is an example of the kind of exaggeration that you use regularly here to categorize the people who disagree with you. And your assumption that the people who take issue with you here all agree on everything is also mistaken. At least it is in my case. But it’s much easier to dismiss us all when you frame us as all of the same body and mind, instead of dealing with what we actually say, when we say it to you.

Next, I perceive no sanctimony on the part of Greenwald in addressing a topic he is actually doing something about. I see an article that addresses the misrepresentation of data on a topic about which Greenwald is particularly informed, and that article addresses the misinformation being spread by another writer.

Now, whether or not Drum’s writing is particularly widespread is not the issue. Nor is the issue whether or not the topic of homelessness is something that has been discarded. If you actually care about the topic – as you claim above – then one would think that you would welcome the correction being offered from someone who is actually doing something about it, as opposed to the musings of someone who is only mouthing misinterpretations. BTW, the emphasis there is not because I am outraged, it is rather an attempt to keep you focused on my actual points, as opposed to those you will no doubt assign to me in any response you care to make.

And I think I’ll leave it at that rather than try to address the rest of the above which strikes me as more of an attempt to drag me into a place where I never intended to go than an honest attempt to understand what I was trying to convey.

Pace. I apologize for my frustration, but these days your writing under each and every Greenwald article seems to be more about finding every remotely tangential nit – in some cases even inventing them wholecloth – in service of obstinate disagreement with Greenwald, as opposed to an honest appraisal of what he is attempting to accomplish and an honest response about the facts and topic at hand. You are correct to critique anyone who simply agrees with Greenwald 100% of the time. But it is equally suspect when someone disagrees with him 100% of the time. Especially when one has to invent reasons to do so, as you seem to be doing here.

p.s. I do not agree with Greenwald 100% of the time. I never have, but go ahead and lump me into whatever category you choose. No skin off my ass whatsoever. :-s Now I’ve got tomatoes and beets to can so I can help out the hungry people I have in my own family while simultaneously thanking the gods that be that none of them are currently homeless (though some have been in the past).

And I think I’ll leave it at that rather than try to address the rest of the above which strikes me as more of an attempt to drag me into a place where I never intended to go than an honest attempt to understand what I was trying to convey.

You made your point quite well.

I for one am thankful for writers who feel it is at least as important, if not more so, to examine those who pay lip service to representing the downtrodden, all while barely hiding the curling sneers they can’t quite keep those same lips from manifesting in the midst of their pious pronouncements.

Suffer not the swine dressed in finery.

Something like that, right?

My meanderings addressed exactly that. Greenwald, in my opinion, once a Tom Paine sort of writer has become a Robespierre kind of critic. Or maybe Beria is more apt. His targets aren’t the obvious criminals infesting Washington like cockroaches in a potato chip factory. Instead he roots out the “hypocrisy” of those — like Drum — not sufficiently pious: the unworthy, the apostates, the counterrevolutionaries, all who fail his purity test. (See Hillary Clinton for example number 1.) It might be a passing remark like that made by Drum or, earlier this year, Krugman. It might be a well know cable voice like Rachel Maddow or an obscure Guardian reporter whom a Republican candidate later body-slammed for asking an impertinent question.

Do you see this pattern?

He often echos Republican talking points and rarely — if ever — seems to defend the political necessities our current alignment of factions display.

And many of the kiddies here (not all as you assert I claim, but many) riff in approval, nooses and pitchforks in hand. Never (in the last six months) has Mr. Greenwald shown any disapproval for these clamoring fans. Indeed, he sometimes makes a point of highlighting their hearty approval. Meanwhile no claim is too vapid, no conspiracy too ridiculous, no political policy too extreme to draw his disdain or censure.

You may not think it so, but I try to offer a voice of restraint and reason. I will continue. I’m sorry if you object to that, but until I’m given reason to revise my understanding, I will continue.

And btw, the story I posted is a specific counter to the Seth Rich murder story so ferociously pushed by Fox. The investigator hired by a Fox friend filed suit yesterday. That is the story. And again, you may not appreciate it, but it displays exactly the sort of story — another fabricated conspiracy blown — which receives little or no coverage. In comparison with Mr. Drum’s grubby and irrelevant emotional honesty, this story reveals exactly how propagandized rightwing cable has become. The implications are significant.

It’s not Alex Jones fabricating a conspiracy theory, it’s the president of the US serving this shit to the public.

“They’re not interested in the world — they’re interested in pushing a[n] malignant agenda which favors the rich, ignores the plight of many citizens, broadcasts talking points rather than reality, pushes policies of commercialism and repression and which — literally — is responsible not only for Trump but for the amorality of the entire society in which we find ourselves.”

This is exactly what the Democrats have colluded in for the past few decades. Why else would Hillary, et al, have need of both a public and a private position on public policy?

Of course the GOP are more single-minded and straightforward about it; but no matter their intentions, the Democrats incremental movement towards centrism and neoliberalism has resulted in a world that favors the rich, ignores the plight of many citizens, broadcasts talking points rather than reality, pushes policies of commercialism and repression and which — literally — is responsible for Trumps election.

This is also why the Democrats will likely lose again with their next presidential candidate: they’ve literally been partners in this crime, and now have too many party members that rely on the very corporations and special interests to maintain their (in many cases, now millionaire) lifestyle to ever give that up without a fight.

I’d like to say I’m hopeful that the Democrats will become once again the party of the people, but after listening to party-apologists such as yourself, and after decades of watching their decline despite millions of lost members and thousands of lost seats nationwide, I have little faith that much critical introspection will be happening anytime soon, much less resulting in actual public policy positions that don’t have a private position lurking somewhere to make their talking points any more meaningful now than they have been for the past thirty years.

This is exactly what the Democrats have colluded in for the past few decades.

Call me an idiot, but a recent vote in the Senate to repeal ACA lost. It didn’t pass 100 to 0.

Instead something remarkable happened.

Three Republicans joined all Democrats to prevent the dissolution of a social program. Earlier versions, expressly opposed by — again — all Democrats included an $800b tax cut for wealthy and (variously) a suspension of Planned Parenthood, a cut of Medicaid, and, thereby, enacts policies “which favors the rich, ignores the plight of many citizens, broadcasts talking points rather than reality, pushes policies of commercialism and repression…”

Sp what’s up with this? Collusion between the parties? Identical policies? Equal malignancy?

As long as you make your silly assertion that they’re both the same parties, you can ignore reality. If that’s what you believe, what makes you write:

I’d like to say I’m hopeful that the Democrats will become once again the party of the people, [but] … much less resulting in actual public policy positions that don’t have a private position lurking somewhere to make their talking points any more meaningful now than they have been for the past thirty years.

So let me ask you a simple question. When the political terrain is shaped primarily by Citizens United (unlimited political spending) why would one party unilaterally disarm? And if a malignant party wanted to justify their own malignancy, why wouldn’t they blame their opponents for doing exactly which they, themselves do.

In other words, you’ve climbed aboard the Republican train while insisting you hate their policies. You empower exactly those who favor the policies you pretend to oppose.

“As long as you make your silly assertion that they’re both the same parties…”

No reasonable person can say that’s what I said. What I said was:

“the Democrats incremental movement towards centrism and neoliberalism has resulted in a world that favors the rich, ignores the plight of many citizens, broadcasts talking points rather than reality, pushes policies of commercialism and repression and which — literally — is responsible for Trumps election.”

I also stated that this decline has been consistently happening over decades. In other words, actual results overall of how Americans are doing under the Democrats “move to the center” policies can be seen with the fact that we do have a world that is even moreso favoring the rich, ignoring the plight of many citizens, is just fine with perpetual wars and regime change, and that pushes policies of commercialism, all of which — literally — are responsible for Trumps election.

If not for the Democrats clinging to these centrist, neoliberal policies we’d not be in this mess at all. These have resulted in the abandonment of their base (as indicated by the millions of lost members and thousands of lost seats) and the resultant erosion in living standards for most Americans.

I mean, for fuck-sake, the income inequality of Americans alone under this failed Democrat “please the center and stay in office” strategy is a shocking disgrace; and it’s just one thing that establishment Democrats don’t want to come forward and own – which is their part in creating the screwed up world as it is today.

“In other words, you’ve climbed aboard the Republican train while insisting you hate their policies. You empower exactly those who favor the policies you pretend to oppose.”

Complete and utter bullshit. It’s the centrist, neoliberal policies that both the Democrats and the GOP have been legislating for decades that has gotten us all where we are.

You and the rest of the Democratic party apologists ARE the problem right now. The GOP is irrelevant, as is Trump. Why? Because there are demonstrably enough voters who have been affected by these centrist policies that didn’t vote continue them this time, and won’t vote to continue them in the future.

It’s the party and the candidates responsibility to EARN those votes from voters – not the other way around. What you’re seeing is voters actually doing their job for once in quite a long time, and not voting for the lesser evil; instead voting for elevating candidates that actually represent their views – unlike the Democrats – who literally elevated Donald Trumps candidacy because they considered it a smart political strategy to do so.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase, — WSJ

GG misrepresentation of Drum’s statements are more egregious than his of the researchers.

I did not see GG refute the statistical claims Drum mentions about homeless people (drug or alcohol addiction and mental health issues). Since GG is typically very thorough I will assume those figures are accurate. Drum does not claim that people like Glenn who have worked with homeless people extensively feel disgusted by them. He is pointing out that initial reaction of disgust is understandable and common for the vast majority of people who don’t have interactions with the homeless outside of trying to avoid them in public or when they drop some change in a cup. The key word in that previous sentence being initial.

Wow, that was bad of Kevin Drum to say “You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that”. He thinks it’s all right to look down on an entire “population”, as he puts it, when he knows that only some of them have the problems he’s describing. And then he takes this disgust towards the homeless and claims that it comes from “innate reflexes”, that it’s even a requirement of sanity, when he should know that there are many good people who feel very differently about the entire issue of homelessness and about those who suffer from it. In just one short sentence Drum manages to make the same irrational move twice: just as being homeless often doesn’t mean someone is mentally ill or addicted, being sane doesn’t mean you share Drum’s misplaced disgust towards the homeless. This is the kind of lazy journalism that treats bad stuff in the status quo as inevitable when it’s not. You know, one big reason why we need journalists or commentators is because we want them to help tell us how bad stuff doesn’t have to happen, but Kevin Drum is mostly acting like the complacent reporter who falsely assures his audience that this bad stuff is automatic and can’t be changed. Before he spouts his mouth off, I wish he’d get out there more like writers should, and learn from the homeless who have compelling stories to tell, or the decent people who love homeless people and who know in their bones that a decent society wouldn’t put people through such bad treatment. His talk about the need for “empathy” is undermined since he’s already shown he doesn’t have enough of it to write truthfully on this.

Everyone makes equally serious mistakes sometimes. So I won’t merely say he ought to apologize for writing that, though I think he should. I give him credit for being honest about his feelings of disgust and for kind of being aware that these feelings are a problem. Although this is a difficult issue to sort out, it’s fairly plausible that most addicts, most mentally ill people, and even homeless people who are neither addicted nor mentally ill have some responsibility for the problems they’ve ended up with. But that’s only a partial responsibility. There isn’t much significant moral difference between the homeless and the rest of us, who have made our own mistakes and bad choices — it’s just that many of us have avoided such serious consequences due to things like our social position, or the people around us, or dumb luck, or finding undeserved ways to avoid the consequences others face for their mistakes. Looking down on the homeless is a way to keep from facing the fact that at some level, you’ve made about as many serious errors yourself and that the homeless person’s potential and good actions have largely gone unrewarded. I recognize that certain humans’ bad actions justify treating them worse than others, or justify looking down on them. But most of the time, societies are too mixed up to reflect that accurately in terms of crude economic statuses like homelessness. And I’m speaking here based on what I’ve seen in the homeless and formerly homeless people I’ve talked with. If you think it’s okay to have a negative feeling towards homeless people who you perceive as being in a shabby state, what justification do you have for assuming that what they’ve done is more wrong than the various things you’ve done? It just dulls your sense of right and wrong, and makes you feel complacent at some level about yourself and society. A good person would instead react by taking personal responsibility, by trying to live more decently and by practicing the kind of politics that adds more to society so that people don’t have these undeserved fates. I have to say, I don’t get the impression from Kevin Drum’s article that he’s doing enough of that, at the level of action and not “empathy”. I hope he apologizes and tries to do better. When Drum sees park benches being used by the people who need them most, he writes “Most people don’t like their park benches being taken over by potentially dangerous vagrants”, suggesting that none of them should be allowed to stay on the benches because SOME of them might be “potentially dangerous”. That kind of overgeneralization can be really harmful to people who already don’t deserve the treatment they’re getting, and I doubt that Drum has given enough thought to the deadly consequences of the narrow-minded point of view he’s promoting here. So I wonder if the complacency and bias peddled by writers like Drum is “potentially dangerous” in a different way.

I tried to eat your comment, but I couldn’t find a place to sink my teeth in. It’s like a monument to the lengthy paragraph or something; lke one of those beach ball sized pastrami sandwiches on that the show where guy eats huge food.

Well said, I agree with your comments entirely and with your empathy towards the homeless. An old saying, often quoted by belivers and nonbelievers alike, succinctly describes this feeling of empathy, ‘there but for the grace ofGod, go I’.

Glen- I am happy to hear that you care for the homeless. Venice, CA is currently undergoing gentrification as Snapchat is buying up everything, and kicking the homeless out.

Every night, surveillance teams emerge onto the beach, with ear piece radio’s and sunglasses, and while they don’t actively do anything in particular, they have in fact caused quite a sense of paranoia and fear among the homeless there, cranking the heat up a notch in already notched lives.

The beach is already lined with camera, and has an extensive police presence, and even a station house, so extra surveillance is purely for a show of force.

In my research into the topic of co-occuring mental illness, with the much maligned subject of victim’s of organized gang stalking, I have found clear, documented links between developers, real estate fraud and theft, and those diagnosed or otherwise fitting the category of “mental illness” in the individuals targeted with this horrific crime.

Here is just one of them, but I know five others-with actual lives and actual names- who report the ‘phenomenon.’

While Drum makes the moral case that disgust shouldn’t keep us from assisting those in need, he misses the main findings of the researchers. They both agree that disgust toward the homeless is not uncommon and it plays a major role in the public attitude towards them.

What Drum misses is twofold: first, he assumes that this disgust is universal–that everyone is disgusted by homeless people, which is false. Not every homeless person is diseased and dirty, and there are plenty of people for whom an encounter, even with the diseased and dirty instances, evokes empathy and compassion, not disgust (This group, evidently doesn’t include Drum). But more importantly, Drum asserts that this disgust is innate, whereas the paper argues that it is at least in part learned, a stereotype that can be promoted or weakened through representation.

The point isn’t simply that “we shouldn’t forsake the homeless just because we are disgusted by them”, but rather, “we don’t *have to* feel disgust toward the homeless because this disgust is learned, and can be replaced with better sentiments.”

Speaking of knowingly false reporting, your headline claims that this is Mother Jones’s research. It’s not, as you indeed say in the article. But you don’t care, as this is merely part of your ongoing twitter war with Jeffrey’s, now over a short blog post. Quite pathetic really Glenn.

Kevin Drum made the mistake of not better identifying the actual subclass of homeless that offend many people. The vast majority of the homeless are situational homeless as Glen describes in his moralizing. Most of these people are attempting to escape homelessness and seek work, training and a home through the many aid programs for this group. They don’t sleep in the street and shouldn’t be panhandling. Most are sheltered every night and bathe regularly.

The other very small but visible and smellable minority are bums, druggies and untreated mentally ill who choose this lifestyle and will not follow basic rules so they are not allowed in the shelters.

The majority of homeless are indistinguishable from anyone else but the unwashed, doped or deranged are going to produce defensive disgust in other people as it should.

He is now doubling down on his assertions that he is correct, and that the researchers themselves – presumably people who have spent years in a career studying such things – as well as all the people who expressed outrage regarding his initial article are “wrong” about how we should/could/do respond to people marginalized by our society.

What is most interesting to me is the length to which those most invested in defending our current political/economic status quo – which has lead to a society where they insist it’s sane to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that – will go to discount/destroy those who are equally vociferous that we don’t have to live in such a society.

Drum better hope to God that the worst doesn’t happen that makes him homeless.

As for me, I’ve been homeless twice because of something that wasn’t my fault. I know what it’s like to walk down the street with no place to go. meanwhile, hundreds of people walk by and NOBODY acknowledges that you’re there. Has Drum ever had that happen to him?

Dunn did indeed extrapolate (wrongly) from S1 that S2 and S3 are false, and he grossly misrepresented the findings of a research paper on the topic in order to do so. That is the point of Greenwald’s article.

Here’s three things that have proven true when it comes to the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill.:
You can cure homelessness by the simple expedient of offering them a place to call home. (See Medicine Hat, for example). The money saved by the reduction in health care, policing, crime, and family services costs actually was more than the cost of the housing services
You can turn the addicted into stable citizens by providing them with the clean version of their drugs through pharmacies (see the ‘Cited’ podcast episode titled ‘The heroin clinic’) Again, ends up saving money for the community, reduces crime, actually would win the ‘War on Drugs’.
And guess what happens when your mentally ill have the stability of a home, and treatment in a home environment. If you think reduced costs to society, reduced crime, etc, you’ve been paying attention (but, for an example of just how far it can go, see the town of Geel in Belgium)

The funny thing is that these things check every one of the boxes that the American right wing claims are important to them, and yet how do you think that American right wing would react to the attempt to make any one of them policy?

Much noise about nothing – artificial and disappointing drama at best. Not only does one need to define ‘disgusting’ – a majority of homeless (talking about LA) seriously is very disgusting – as are the circumstances they live in. To pretend it ain’t so is plain stupid. That doesn’t mean I don’t have compassion but it also doesn’t mean to close one’s eyes to reality. Glenn should do better – articles like that are ’empty calories’.

Well, I certainly do respect your openness on wanting more data from the other side.

But here’s some food for thought, if you don’t mind. It seems like Drum is saying to the scholars, “You don’t know or understand what you’ve said”.

I think the scholars at Boston U know exactly what they’ve said and what their own data means. And they have come out and said that Drum has misunderstood, to which Drum is now refuting. (See Pedinska post)

So, let me ask you. Drum has now made 2 statements refuting the authors of the study and thier interpretation. How many more statements do you need to come to a conclusion?

This is just another example of people like Greenwald and others, not understanding the definition used by a person of a particular word. Just like when creationist say “Just a Theory”, or anti-vaxxers saying “I researched it”. In this context “disgust” is an actual psychological term. It’s the disgust response. When he says it’s natural, that’s because it is. Disgust was used as a shortcut for humans to stay safe. Those humans who saw smelly stinking meat and went up to it and eat it anyway, died. Those who were disgusted by it, lived. This is the same short cut we use when dealing with all sorts of things, and people. Disgust is the natural reaction people have when they see someone who is unwashed, dirty, and sleeping on the street, not because they don’t like homeless people, but because of thousands of years of “better steer clear of that or you’ll died” Being programmed into us by nature. To not understand this concept, within the context of this study, shows nothing but intentional ignorance and faux outrage.

“Disgust is an actual psychological term”..yes, as noted in the last sentence as “reflexive” and rational..
Another aspect of this might be , What one considers disgusting signifies their political prevalence?
As in, a group being disgusted by what’ve another groups considers disgusting
The article in MJ cited the research to support a conclusion, the research actually negated.
Interesting

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You are correct that if you interact with the homeless for any amount of time you find that they are not “disgusting” or horrible people. However, the fact is that most people do NOT interact with the homeless so Drum’s conclusion that most people will feel “disgusted” when confronted with a panhandler or person sleeping on a park bench isn’t far off the mark.

Where Drum goes too far is in saying that it is rational or sane to feel this way. I agree with him that it may be a natural reaction but that doesn’t make it rational or sane. In fact it’s quite the opposite.

In short, while I agree with Drum that holding both views (supporting aid for the homeless while simultaneously supporting removing the homeless from public view) is perfectly understandable I can’t agree with his conclusion that it’s rational or sane to feel this way.

“The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’”

Anyone who says it is “natural” to be disgusted by a group of people of whom a third abuse alcohol or drugs … has forgotten the popularity of the college fraternity!

The fact is, EVERY ACTION is disgusting, evil, and despicable when it is done by those poor enough, and it is admirable, daring, and enviable when done by those rich enough. The poor have alcohol problems, the rich tipple. The poor collapse in crack houses, the rich snort cocaine in jetset parties. The poor lounge about in contemptible parasitic idleness; the rich use their inherited millions and unearned interest income to tour the world and manage their estates.

The schoolyard bully is the paragon of world governance, the bronze idol to whom every president and senator aspires to measure up. Gang up on the weak, fawn obsequiously on the strong, pretend that is morality with a moral certainty that eludes the faithful of most religions.

This is a huge non-story. Researchers found that disgust motivates some people’s attitudes toward homelessness policy. Kevin Drum, discussing that research, identified specific reasons that, in his opinion, explain or justify disgust toward the homeless. There’s no indication that the research addressed whether the disgust was justified, so there is no evidence that Drum mischaracterized the research. None.

Drum didn’t misquote the research, but he did misrepresent it. He reported some of the findings of the research. But he didn’t mention other findings of the research that would have potentially undermined what he was saying. When he did quote findings of the research, he combined them with his own irrational arguments to draw his own conclusions. A journalist presenting research to an audience of laypeople should not do these things. It amounts to misrepresentation, and the researchers and other journalists were right to criticize him for it.

To be specific:

–Drum’s discussion of the idea of “banning panhandling” is kind of friendly to the idea. He says, sympathetically, that most people don’t like panhandlers speaking to them, and when he distinguishes between how “decent human beings” and “heartless bastards” want to treat the homeless, he implies that support for a ban on panhandling isn’t one of the policy preferences that makes you a “heartless bastard”. So he gives readers the impression that banning panhandling is more or less okay. But he doesn’t quote the researchers’ argument that a ban on panhandling is “harmful, causing homeless people to be regularly cycled through prisons and jails, in turn making it more dif?cult for them to hold a job and escape from poverty” (page 504 of their article). Since Drum is appealing to the researchers’ findings as support for his positions, it’s disappointing that he doesn’t mention the arguments they give against one of the views he’s encouraging.

–Drum omitted the researchers’ findings that the media can trigger negative emotions towards the homeless and increase support for anti-homeless exclusionary policies. This kind of research about the media is important — those who follow the media can use this research to evaluate the media more thoughtfully, for instance. But Drum didn’t mention the researchers’ findings about the potentially harmful effect that the media can have in encouraging these negative emotions. Had he mentioned that, his encouraging words towards these negative emotions would have been recognized by more readers as potentially detracting from the trustworthiness of his coverage.

–Also, Drum makes several irrational moves in trying to justify his own conclusions from the research, as I mentioned in my comment above.

A journalist can try to use researchers’ work to argue for a conclusion that differs from what the researchers think, but it’s not okay to do it in such an irrational way. The laypeople who read a media article can’t be expected to look up the research paper it’s based on and work through the evidence on their own, so readers need to be informed when the only article you’re citing actually has a lot of stuff that argues against your point.

What’s disgusting are the conditions of life that make homelessness possible. Lack of mental health care, lack of jobs, lack of social support, lack of housing. Lack of everything, in fact, that makes a decent life possible. Our society has become one in which a lack of compassion and a “me first” credo has destroyed all forms of support for those who have fallen, for one reason or another, upon hard times.

I daresay all this talk of digust is nauseating, and I have never felt it towards a homeless person, no matter their condition. No child ever said, “I hope I grow up to be homeless.” Mother Jones should be ashamed.